Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 11 of 22

Shhhh! Russia Can Like Something and It Can Be Good.

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On July 21, 2017

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I know, I know. Russia is evil, the worstest of the worst and is made worse by Trump, because it’s Russia’s fault that Trump is President, not because Clinton ran a terrible campaign and Obama presided over an economy that worked for only about 3 percent of the population.

But maybe, just maybe, even though Russia is the Antichrist and Trump is the Devil (or the Devil’s Jester), it is possible that Trump might do something that Russia likes, and it might be good.

Like Trump telling the CIA to stop smuggling weapons to rebels in Syria? By which we mean, mostly people who are nasty Jihadis?

I know, I know, Assad is bad therefore anything bad that is done to him is good, even if it means causing a civil war which has cost many lives; far more lives and suffering than if there hadn’t been a civil war.

So, since Trump is bad, and Russia eeeevil, and Assad is evil, it therefore follows that giving guns to nasty people so they can ruin an entire country is good.

Or maybe, just maybe, Assad and some Russian policies and Trump can be bad, but it can still be possible that sending weapons to cause and fuel a civil war is a bad idea? Especially one where the main opposition are a bunch of Wahhabi insurgents with a truly ugly ideology; far worse than Assad’s?

It’s just a thought that perhaps, sometimes bad people and bad countries (has Russia done more evil than America in the last 30 years? Readers may wish to think carefully…), might do the right thing. They might even do the right thing for reasons you think are bad, and that right thing, despite being done by bad people for bad reasons (is having good relations with Russia by ending support for a terrible civil war bad?) might be…good?

Well, who knows. Trump is the worstest of the worst, and Putin is his puppet master, and… yeah, sorry, can’t keep up with the current story line.

Still, I can’t help but think that it might not be a bad idea to stop sending weapons to Syrian rebels, irrespective of whether I have any sympathy for any of them. It might be that helping start the Syrian civil war and keeping it going was bad policy; in both realpolitik and ethical terms, and it might be that Trump is doing the right thing here, whether or not he is doing it for the right reasons.

Maybe.

Perhaps, on those rare occasions when a politician we hate does the right thing, we should honestly admit it. Perhaps if we don’t, there is something wrong, not just with him, but with us?

Or heck, perhaps we prefer to live in a world where people we hate are always wrong, no matter what they do, and change our definitions of right or wrong to suit their actions?

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Why There Is More Reason to Hope Today than in Decades

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On July 12, 2017

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Somewhere between the late 80s and the early 90s, with Clinton’s election, hope died.

The post-war era had serious issues, but the post-war era–as the civil rights movement and 70s feminism showed–was handling those issues. It was moving in the right direction. Until it didn’t, until it couldn’t handle the cascade of problems from the rise of oil prices.

In Britain, Thatcher got into power; America got Reagan. They were opposed by people who preferred to try and fix the older world, and those people lost. So there came the third way, which said: “If you can’t beat them, join them!” Clinton, Blair, and all the various folks like them wanted to do Thacherism and Reaganism but with less cruelty.

That couldn’t, and wouldn’t, work. Clinton set the stage for large chunks of the financial crisis: He gutted welfare, set up truly cruel standards for incarceration which gutted poor black communities especially, and hurt everyone else who was poor, even if less.

Blair, his British counterpart, was onside with Iraq, and blah, blah, blah.

None of them did anything about climate change worth speaking of. Their solution to pollution in the developed world was to ship the most polluting industries to developing countries, mostly notably China, and pollution there is as bad as it ever was in the first world.

Meanwhile, as we all know, they pursued a raft of policies whose effect was to funnel money to the rich, gutting the middle class over time (though the middle class benefited at first) and impoverishing many. This created oligarchical power structures throughout the west, abetted by technocrats insulated from control by elected politicians.

The point here is that the trends were mostly bad. Those few good trends, such as improvements in parts of the developing world were not a result of neoliberalism (China used mercantile policies to industrialize), and in fact, as Ha Joon shows in Bad Samaritans, growth in the developing world was slower in the neoliberal era than in the post-war era.

We have been driving ourselves towards, not disaster, but catastrophe, and not one catastrophe, but many.

So, people thought I was pessimistic. I wasn’t. I never was. I was realistic. Because it’s government and corporate policy, it’s the policy of all of our elites, to do things which would have forseeable bad consequences. That’s been policy and they’ve been very determined to stick with it.

So, there has been no room for what some people mistake as optimism. Hope. The only hope was that at some point this would change. As long as we kept electing people like Clinton or Obama, there could be no hope because those in power haven’t wanted to change the way the world is run. They don’t intend to do anything which would avoid catastrophe.

That is just how it’s been.

So now everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and I’m the calm one.

Because there is now reason for hope. Large masses of people are now willing to vote for politicians who want to do the right thing. It is too late to avoid much of the consequences of what we have done. It is simply too late. We have methane release in the arctic, we have a great species die-off, and it’s too late.

But it is not too late to mitigate. As the first rule of holes states, “When you find yourself in a hole, first, stop digging.”

We haven’t even done that yet, really. There’s a small amount as solar becomes cheaper than coal, something which should have happened 20 years ago through government intervention, but it’s too late.

However, with Sanders and Corbyn’s near successes, with the fact that so many would consider voting for them, with Melenchon in France coming so close, there is now reason to hope that we finally have an electorate willing to consider actual change to do the necessary things.

This was not true in the past. People like Sanders and Corbyn were not taken seriously as national candidates. The idea was laughable.

So this is hope; a bright, shining, slender thing.

We have it now. And yet people are running around like the sky is falling. The only reason they are doing so is that most of them didn’t understand that the decisions which caused all the problems we’re having today were taken and reaffirmed for decades. If you knew where they were going (and it wasn’t hard to), you just had to look and not flinch. If you were able to do this, nothing that is happening today, nothing, is surprising–in general terms.

The only thing that is interesting is that a large number of people, and especially young people, are turning away from doing the wrong thing, and showing openness to change. This creates a crossroads: They may choose something worse, or something better. I think they’ll take something better when offered; we saw that with Corbyn, and polls now show he’d win an election held today.

Of course, they’ll also take something worse if it means change from the status quo. We’ve seen that.

But they are willing to Change, and that means there is Hope.

So, the sky is creaking, but that’s already been predetermined and running around screaming about in affected surprise is pathetic.

Meanwhile, we may be able to begin reducing the worst of what is to come, rather than continually trying to make it worse.

And that, my friends, is reason for hope.

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There Is No Major “Good” Government Leader

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On July 9, 2017

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I can think of few things more pathetic than watching the reaction to something like the G20, and seeing regular people cheering for one leader over another.

There are no non-evil major leaders. I see a lot of Merkel praise lately, but this is the woman who destroyed Greece, causing many deaths and much suffering, because she wanted to bail out German banks indirectly, rather than directly. Over 90 percent of the money sent to “Greece” has actually gone back to banks, and the cost has been great misery. Merkel could have just bailed out the banks without harming the citizens.

Merkel is a truly, profoundly, evil person. If you think she isn’t, your moral compass is in your nether regions. Now, of course, like most leaders, Merkel has done some good, even praiseworthy things, but when you kill and impoverish an entire nation because your commitment to your ideology won’t let you just bail out banks directly, you’re evil.

This makes every major decision maker at the IMF evil (and for far more than just Greece) and certainly makes those EU decision makers involved evil.

Putin has many admirers, but he is a bad man, and if you don’t believe it, it is because you don’t want to know.

May is clearly evil. Trump has continued wars he could have and should have stopped. Those of you who love Obama, who is no longer in power, love an evil man, who destroyed Libya for no good reason and expanded and ran a huge assassination program. Macron is scum, he ran Hollande’s economic policy, which was a mess, and he has spent the summer fighting unions. His economic policy won’t work–on the contrary, it will hurt a lot of people. Bill Clinton was scum; his embargo of Iraq cost about a million civilian lives, half of whom were children. He was okay with that.

There are almost no exceptions: Everyone who runs a major country in this period is evil. Generally, there isn’t even a case of being able to say, “Well, they’ve done some bad things, but the good they’ve done outweighs it.” None of them are FDR, where you can say, “That’s clearly evil, but at least he did more good than evil.”

None of these people are your friends. None of them have your best interest at heart. None of them care about your civil liberties, freedom, or prosperity; whether you live or die is a matter of indifference to them. (Well, there is a small class of people they do care about. If you’re one of those people and happen to read me, you know who you are.)

The reason I am behind Corbyn so vehemently is that, for the first time in my life, there is a candidate with a serious chance of running a major power who isn’t “the lesser evil.” Even Sanders was a lesser evil candidate; albeit a heck of a lot lesser. Corbyn was against all the wars. He supports Palestinians, etc, etc. He isn’t perfect, but he’s easily in the “far more good than evil” camp. Note just how much the press and almost everyone else in the elite hates him.

If he gets in power, we’ll see how he does, but at least he has an actual record of integrity and doing the right thing, when he had every reason to believe that it meant he’d never be in power.

None of that is true of Merkel, Trump, Obama, May, etc.

You are their meat. You are their subjects. Your existence matters to them only to the extent you serve their ambition and their ideology, and no more. They have somewhat less care for you than a farmer shows for his cows.

Knowing who has your best interests at heart, who actually cares about you and will act on it, is the most basic human survival skill. We were very good at it back when we lived in bands of 40 to 60 people, but we are terrible at it when living in societies of millions, when we don’t know who everyone is.

We’d best learn, because our failure is costing us dearly, and it will cost us more in the future.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

The Black Book Of Capitalism

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On June 27, 2017

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There is a famous book, the Black Book of Communism, which claims to total up all the deaths communism responsible for.

Strangely, there is no Black Book of Capitalism.

This is odd, because capitalism has been around longer than communism, has been more powerful, and has controlled more of the world, and the world was hardly a utopia before communism.

Surely one should look at what deaths can be attributed to capitalism?

Can one, for example, total up the deaths of the Opium War? It was a war fought entirely over whether Britain ought to be able to sell opium to the Chinese. The Chinese government didn’t want that, but the Chinese people were happy to buy opium.

It was, in effect, a war for free trade.

What about all the colonial wars, and all the colonial famines and massacres? Oh, this is an old argument, “Is imperialism part of capitalism?”

It was certainly understood that way by many actual imperialists, and it was certainly run that way. Before Britain conquered India, India had more manufacturing capacity than Britain. The British, however, wanted Indians as customers, not competitors, and made sure to shut most of that down.

And there were certainly a lot of famines in India under the British. Is it fair to attribute those to capitalism? If it isn’t, why not? A large number of the deaths in the original Black Book are deaths due to famine.

Europeans conquered other nations to obtain control over resources and markets, and they weren’t shy in saying this was the case. Cotton flooded in from colonial North America, sugar from the Carribean, fur from the northern North America, ruled, in effect, by the Hudson’s Bay Company for centuries just as India was ruled by the East India company.

Oh, they were government granted monopolies, to be sure, but to pretend they weren’t capitalist smacks of “Russia wasn’t actually communism.” Britain was a capitalist country, and either what it did was capitalism or what Russia did wasn’t communism when it didn’t align with what Marx prescribed (in which case none of what Russia or China did was communism, because according to Marx you can’t jump from agrarian to communist).

Imperialism was part of Capitalism, and was seen as such. Even after WWII, when overt imperialism was put aside, the Western powers still felt they had a right to overthrow governments, launch coups, and force specific economic policies on other nations. Those policies often included “don’t subsidize food,” and a lot of people starved because of them.

Let us say you want to write off imperialism as not “true capitalism.” An aberration. I think you’re full of it, but let’s pretend.

Ok, then, what about the Great Depression? Was that not a capitalist failure?

There is no straight-faced argument which says that it wasn’t. Nor am I willing to, with a straight face, pretend that World War II happens without the Great Depression.

So, how many of the deaths from World War II are attributable to capitalism’s failure in the Great Depression?

“Ah,” say those who love capitalism, “but we have learned since then.”

If so, presumably, communism can learn from its failures.

But has capitalism learned? Are great disasters caused by the failures of markets a thing of the past?

We all know they aren’t, because we all know that markets failed to handled climate change, and anyone with sense knows that climate change will cause between hundreds of millions and billions of deaths.

That’s a lot of deaths in the ledger.

As I have noted before, the idea that everyone acting primarily selfishly and greedily leads to general welfare, will go down in history, should we still have historians, as one of the most unbelievably stupid ideas, and ideologies in our history. Even if you believe that “capitalism” gets credit for all the gains of the last 200 years (as opposed to democracy, or industrialization), that will be vastly outweighed by what comes after, and, perhaps, by all the deaths and suffering along the way.

All systems have their flaws. I see a great deal of capitalist triumphalism, still, without a willingness to acknowledge its failures–or even that its successes came at the cost of great human suffering and massive numbers of deaths.

In a certain sense, I think that this misses the point. People with power did what they wanted and the weak suffered. As usual. And the gains were driven mostly by improved technology: which is industrialization, not by specific ideological systems.

Still, when you make markets your main economic decision making engine, you can’t then turn around and say they aren’t responsible for what happens. When your foreign policy is run by economic concerns and by ideological considerations you can’t say that your ideology had no effect.

By any reasonable definition, in my opinion, a Black Book of Capitalism‘s death toll probably far outnumbers those of The Black Book of Communism already. And once the climate change butcher’s bill comes due, it won’t even be close.

The fact is simple: All our decision making methods–governmental and ideological, communist, capitalist, democratic–have produced monstrous outcomes, and at most the best period for large numbers of peoples, the late 20th century, was a temporary phenomenon whose cost will be a vast reduction in welfare in the future. All we did is beggar, and kill, our grandchildren.

We, humans, cannot handle the power of industrialization, of this level of technology. We have proved it. But we had best figure out how. Perhaps the next few generations, who will not be able to ignore the dead and pretend only “the other side” killed them, will finally figure it out.

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The Fall of the USSR

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On June 25, 2017

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The best book on both successes and failures of the Soviet Union is Mancur Olson’s Power and Prosperity. If you haven’t read it, you should. The second best is Randall Collins’ Essay in Macrosociology.

The great problem with most critiques of the USSR is that they do not explain its successes. In the 20s and 30s, it did far better in most respects than the West. In the 40s and 50s–and even into the early 60s, it was still doing very well. They put the first satellite in orbit, produced tanks that were as good as the West’s, and produced the most successful assault rifle in history. As late as the early eighties, there were points at which Russia’s best tanks were better than the West’s.

The USSR was one of the few nations larger than a city state which had industrialized through a process other than the use of mercantilist policies. During the Great Depression, the USSR vastly outperformed the West.

So, why did it fail? There are two perspectives. I believe both have a lot of truth to them. Let’s start with Olson’s: The failure of the USSR was a feedback problem. At the beginning of the USSR, local cliques and power groups had not formed. The central planners knew exactly how much was being produced, as well as exactly how much could be produced, and were thus able to coerce people into producing what they knew was possible to make.

As time went on, this became increasingly impossible. Put simply, the locals controlled the information flow to the center, and lied about what they could produce and what they did produce. Workers worked less than they could have, local bosses appropriated production to themselves, and the secret police couldn’t keep up, or became corrupted themselves. Absent accurate information, the central planners lost control. Everyone slacked off, corruption soared, production dropped, and the products produced were crap, especially the consumer goods. (The USSR remained able to produce some of the best military equipment right to the end.) Food production tumbled.

The second perspective is the geopolitical one. The USSR had less population than the Western alliance. It was faced with enemies on every side, while the US was isolated by sea from any possible assault and Europe only had to worry about attack from one direction. It had a smaller economy than its enemies. To keep up with its enemies militarily, it had to spend a larger percentage of its economic production than the West did. With a central position and a smaller economy, why would you think it wouldn’t crumble under the strain? I will note that Collins made this argument BEFORE it crumbled. By every normal “Great Power” metric, the USSR was weaker than its enemies. Fiscal strain is normal in such a situation, and it is to be expected that the economically weaker power will eventually lose. From a pure power perspective, and ignoring nuclear weapons, the USSR should have launched an all-out attack on Europe no later than the 70s.

This is basic guns-and-butter economics, understood by Adam Smith. The more you spend on your military and your security apparatus, the more your civilian economy suffers, especially as the most brilliant scientists and engineers are hived off from civilian production. The longer this goes on, the more you suffer. If you’re facing economies that are much larger than yours, you’re screwed. And the US economy was the largest in the world starting in the late 19th century, let alone a recovered European one.

As the USSR failed under these twin problems, exacerbated by the bleeding ulcer of the Afghan war, they also suffered ideological decay: They stopped believing in their own form of government, and became less and less willing to kill for it. When push came to shove, rather than use the Red Army to maintain control (something it was still capable of doing), they didn’t believe in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact enough to do so.

Now let us turn to capitalism. The advantage of capitalism v. central planning, is that information is sent through prices, supply and demand. This information feedback, however, is still gameable by power blocs. The exact strategies are different than in a command economy, but the end result is the same. The West and the US are currently undergoing this exact problem. The entire financial crisis was about inaccurate feedback and broken feedback loops–it was about the financial and housing industries deliberately damaging the feedback system. Then, when it finally went off a cliff, they destroyed the capitalistic feedback system (which, when properly operating, forces companies into bankruptcy) by obtaining bailouts due to owning western governments.

There are myriad other problems with feedback in the developed world right now, from massive subsidies of corn and oil, to oligopolistic practices rife through telecom and insurance, to the runaway printing of money by banks, to the concealment of losses by mark to fantasy on bank books, to the complete inability and unwillingness to price in the effects of pollution and climate change.

The great problem with humans is that we lack time perspective. In a hundred years, when historians and whoever deals with economic issues look back (hopefully not economists as we understand them), they aren’t going to be that impressed that Western Capitalism outlasted Soviet Communism by forty or fifty years. Instead, they are going to look back and say that both were doomed, in large part, by their inability to manage the exact same problem. In both cases, the feedback systems which controlled economic production were so perverted by various internal power blocs that the societies were unable to reproduce the material circumstances necessary for their continuance.

(This piece was originally published February 2014. I think it still says some important things, and many new readers will not have seen it, so back to the top. Ian.)

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The Congressional Shooting and Political Violence

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On June 15, 2017

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Alright, so someone took a shot at Congressional Republicans and killed no one, though one Congressperson was injured badly.

I find that I am unable to care about this. No one died (because they had police protection).

However, there is a great deal of stupidity and hypocrisy floating around about this. Let us start with the hypocrisy.

So, it happens to people they know, without anyone even dying, and they’re all breaking up in tears. As someone else said, did they cry for Sandy Hook or Pulse? To hell with them, especially as they belong to the class with the most responsibility for mass shootings.

Now, to the stupidity from my favorite highly-educated idiot:

I usually don’t talk about anything Ezra says, because his entire career has been about sucking up to those in power.  But, well, this is a teaching moment.

Here’s a lovely chart:

Isn’t that a wonderful chart?

What do you think happened to suddenly raise the incarceration rate?

Right…the War on (some) Drugs.

So, something that wasn’t illegal became illegal. Making it illegal didn’t reduce its use, but did make using it much more unsafe.

What happens in prisons? Well, a lot of violence, including a lot of rape.

Is that political violence? Well, it wouldn’t have happened if politicians hadn’t made a decision to make something legal, illegal, which increased harm to everyone and didn’t make the situation any better.

That is political violence.

Of course there is also non-domestic political violence—like Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Libya, and so on. A lot of people died due to those entirely political decisions. Not one of those countries attacked the US. Not one.

But now “real people” have been attacked, and they are in tears. They had no tears for dead children.

But they have tears for themselves.

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The Off-Ramps Never Used

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On May 19, 2017

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This is an old joke:

A very religious man was once caught in rising floodwaters. He climbed onto the roof of his house and trusted God to rescue him. A neighbour came by in a canoe and said, “The waters will soon be above your house. Hop in and we’ll paddle to safety.”

“No thanks,” replied the religious man. “I’ve prayed to God and I’m sure he will save me.”

A short time later, the police came by in a boat. “The waters will soon be above your house. Hop in and we’ll take you to safety.”

“No thanks,” replied the religious man. “I’ve prayed to God and I’m sure he will save me.”

A little time later, a rescue services helicopter hovered overhead, let down a rope ladder, and said: “The waters will soon be above your house. Climb the ladder and we’ll fly you to safety.”

“No thanks,” replied the religious man. “I’ve prayed to God and I’m sure he will save me.”

All this time, the floodwaters continued to rise, until soon they reached above the roof and the religious man drowned. When he arrived in heaven, he demanded an audience with God. Ushered into God’s throne room, he said, “Lord, why am I here in heaven? I prayed for you to save me! I trusted you to save me from that flood.”

“Yes you did my child” replied the Lord. “And I sent you a canoe, a boat, and a helicopter. But you never got in.”

I am watching, right now, the British, offered an off-ramp by Jeremy Corbyn, and refusing it. Corbyn has been right in his life about almost everything: He was against every bad war, he was against cutting welfare, he was against privatizations, he was against bad trade deals, and bailouts, and so on.

More than this, he acted on that: He voted against them, spoke against them, marched against them. He has not taken bribes, he has not charged the taxpayer for fancy hotels or booze. He is a man of integrity who can reasonably be expected to do what he says.

Like all men of integrity, that means he won’t always tell you want to hear, but that’s the price you pay if you want an actual honest person in charge.

So, of course, Brits are going to elect May, a truly horrid woman who is complicit in taking wheelchairs away from the poor, and a thousand other things you can read about if you have the curiosity of a turnip and access to a search engine.

Many rowing boats, helicopters, and so on have been offered throughout my life. I remember the warnings about inequality rising from the mid 80s. I remember the warnings about climate change, also from the mid 80s. (They existed earlier, but I was too young.)

Candidates ran who were good on these things, including presidential candidates like Kucinich. They were laughed at and ridiculed. Everyone knows that you can’t actually tax rich people, forbid corruption, or not destroy the ecosphere’s ability to support human life for profit.

People screamed from the rooftops. Many many books were published. People went on TV. Huge marches occurred.

But candidates who would actually reverse bad policy were jokes. “Hahahaha. Only suckers want to do the right thing. He’s not a credible candidate, we have to vote for someone evil, just a little less evil than the most evil candidate!”

Hahahahaha.

The off-ramps were there. They were offered time and time again. And we refused them, time and time again.

At some point, the off-ramps will run out. In fact, they already have. All the off-ramps now lead to “OMG THIS IS SUCKSVILLE.” But the off-ramps coming up, and pretty damn soon, are labelled “First Level of Hell.”

The current catastrophes and the upcoming ones were all affirmatively chosen and then re-affirmed repeatedly by voting majorities or pluralities, and by the elites of every major country.

When you die, if there is a God, don’t ask him why he didn’t send help. Ask him why we didn’t accept it.

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How to Think About Thoughts

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On April 23, 2017

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I wanted to title this “The Thoughts Are a Lie,” but it wouldn’t be true. Not entirely. Some thoughts are a lie, some thoughts aren’t, many are half-truths.

To mangle a pair of modern metaphors, thoughts are context-sensitive help combined with auto-correct, and both are based on emotional charge and salience.

For example, my mind, on hearing or even thinking the phrase “My name is…” will automatically fill in “Inigo Montoya.”

In the 70s, when I was young, dinosaurs still—-I mean, scientists announced that cholesterol was bad, mmmmkay, and margarine became a thing. Not only was it “better for you” than butter, it was a heck of a lot cheaper.

The butter producers struck back with an ad, and as a result, whenever my brain hears “butter” it automatically fills in “tastes better, naturally!” (My search engine fu has failed to find a copy online.)

Thanks, Brain. (Also, as best I can tell, margarine is probably worse for you than butter, just like most artificial sweeteners are worse for you than just chowing down on sugar.)

This same process is at work with all sorts of stuff for everyone. (The following examples aren’t necessarily personal.)

At the personal level, we may see a friend’s face as cold if it passes over us and think he’s angry at us. On inquiry, he’s just having a bad day. A pack of boisterous young men may trigger non-verbal fear; or a black man. Or white men with buzz cuts, depending on our history and politics.

We may see someone with long hair and think “damn hippy.” Or we see a man in a suit and think “fucking suit” or have feelings of deference (or both). If you think most people don’t defer to men in suits, you’re quite wrong; I used to amuse myself by dealing with the same person dressed up and dressed down. Not only was the treatment almost always completely different, most of them didn’t even recognize that they’d dealt with me before.

The people who impressed me were the ones who treated me the same no matter how I was dressed.

Thoughts are conditioned. What has been impressed upon us in the past plays out in the present and the future, whether it is appropriate or useful. The worst of this is when the original conditioning was mixed. The word love is like this for most people. Their parents told them they loved them, then punished or mistreated them, sometimes horribly.

They love their parents, they also hate them, and they are scared, and love brings up all of these feelings and chains of thought which have nothing to do with the current relationship, and everything to do with the relationships where they learned to love.

Thoughts are, thus, best regarded as information before the senses, like any other information. The same is true of feelings. They may be true and valid, or they may be crap–prejudices or emotional battery from the past, completely inappropriate to the current situation.

The thoughts, and often the emotions, are a lie.

There’s a strain of modern “thought” which says that all emotions are valid. Well, they’re all real, they aren’t all appropriate or accurate. (That said, if you feel scared around someone, I’d generally obey that particular emotion and get the fuck away, especially if you aren’t sure you can take them in a fight.)

This is true on a personal level, and it is true on a political level. People’s political opinions are conditioned reflexes in almost all cases: They have not spent time carefully thinking them through. Someone they respect told them something, they identify with that person, they adopt that belief. Or they read it somewhere and never thought about it, or it’s the most common belief in their peer group, and if they want to be liked (and they do) they’d best say it; and after a while they believe it.

Heck, often immediately. If you like someone, you tend to accept their beliefs as valid unless you have strong reason not to. In fact, one of the core functions of being a friend is validating the other person. You may occasionally push back, but it tends to be occasional. (The sort of teasing relationships many people have don’t contradict this.)

Humans are bundles of conditioning, and we run with that conditioning most of the time, not thinking about it or challenging it. That conditioning manifests as thoughts and emotions (which are just feelings in the body), and we take them as valid–even true–most of the time, because they are our feelings.

But very often they aren’t. If they are, it’s by chance, we sure haven’t validated them.

Most thoughts don’t require us to believe them, and we’re happier if we don’t. In most cases, if we treat thoughts as if some random dude had just spewed them, we’d be more likely to judge them, or dismiss them, properly.

And, frankly, most people are happier that way.

One of the secrets of suffering is that you suffer for anything you identify with. If someone says “favorite politician is a corrupt bozo,” you only care if you identify with that politician. You’re only bothered.

You think thoughts are “yours” and you identify with them, and you suffer because of that identification, when if some random bozo said the same thing, you might well laugh it off.

Reduce your identification, don’t assume validity, and thoughts lose a lot of their power to harm you, to control you and to misdirect you. Given that most of your thoughts are just conditioned reflexes, from conditioning you did not choose, that is the correct way to treat them.

The same, in general, is true of feelings, with a partial exception for fear (if you fear someone in your life, you’re probably right and shouldn’t take the chance you aren’t, get out).

Treat thoughts and emotions this way, and you’ll be far happier, too.

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